“I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.”

“I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.”

“I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it's most important when it's negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.”

“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman”

“And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.”

“I don't like to think of myself as a 'virgin'. I prefer to think of myself as 'sexually incomplete'. You know. Like I haven't finished the course yet.”